A study is in progress (with posttesting planned for April 1989), which examines whether word processing enhances the particular benefits of sentence-combining practice on the reading comprehension and writing fluency of low-achieving intermediate students. Subjects are 80 low-achieving fourth grade students from a Florida school district,…

Sentences are understood by outlining associative relations between the concepts representing the meanings of the words. When the words are received the activation spreads from their conceptual counterparts to the other concepts in memory, so that some implicit thoughts are often added to the mental representation of a sentence. As sentences are…